Talk:Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers

Examples
We have examples .We cannot be adding every word here.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 10:42, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
 * True. The nice thing about the way it's formatted is that the examples listed are actually sourced.  That seems like a good criteria for exclusion to me.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  05:07, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Couldn't get past the first sentence without gagging--another wikimessapedia article.

If you are going to use goofy phonemics to establish the problem sounds, you ought to stick with the silly rules of that game. Phonemically speaking, Japanese has two [r] sounds--the Japanese /r/ and the Japanese palatal /r'/. Trubetskoy even noted this way way way back when. Take, for example, the lexical contrast: rou (candle) and ryou (dormitory). There is a phonetic contrast and, classically speaking, a phonemic one as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.7.7.240 (talk) 07:48, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your point, but please restrain the condescending attitude. The person who made the mistake you ridiculed did more than you did; he wrote the article.  If you possess an expert opinion, please help out instead of mocking Wikipedia and phonetics as well.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.149.8.160 (talk) 02:39, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

The article opens with: Japanese has one liquid phoneme /r/, realized usually as an apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant [l]. English has two: an alveolar lateral approximant /l/ and a rhotic consonant /r/ of varying phonetic properties centered on the postalveolar approximant [ɹ].

Comment: Seriously, how can you phonetically describe the English /l/ as only an alveolar lateral when in in many forms, it simply isn't? Like post-vocalically. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.241.72.9 (talk) 08:19, 20 May 2018‎ (UTC)
 * Good point, revised. Nardog (talk) 08:28, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Citation style
Regarding the "morefootnotes" tag I placed on this article (which was subsequently reverted by User:Aeusoes1): The citation style in this article is both unorthodox and not completely function. Clicking the some of them doesn't seem to work. I don't know why the wheel is being re-invented with this article in any case. And, to be honest, I don't think that I recognized the footnotes as footnotes when I placed the tag. Also, I believe a bibliography tends to be against standard Wikipedia references practice. RobertM525 (talk) 04:37, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The "morefootnotes" tag is for when references are given at the end (whether it's called "bibliography" "works cited" or "references") but there isn't inline citation to pinpoint which claims are from which sources. It seems your complaints aren't in regards to that, per se.  Rather, you have difficulty with some of the references not being fully functioning links (a problem I've brought up at the discussion page for the template being used here).  This is a problem, but the links are an optional feature anyway and it's still strikingly clear which sources are being talked about when.  There are a few citations that could be improved with page numbers but, again, this isn't a problem of missing footnotes. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  08:06, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I see that now. I was too hasty with the "morefootnotes" tag. RobertM525 (talk) 05:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ I've fixed the links. They should all work now. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 17:02, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Significance
Is this article significant? Many people learning a foreign language have difficulty distinguishing two sounds that only have one similar sound in their own language. Some languages only have one phoneme for l, r, and n. Is there a mention of those? Is there an article about Russians learning to distinguish v and w? This would be an interesting and well-known example on a page about the phenomenon of foreign-language sound learning, or would be a good article if it were one of many on the subject. However, in the current state, it seems out of place. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.149.8.160 (talk) 02:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree. This isn't an encyclopedic topic. I don't think articles need to be written for every language against every other language regarding sound differences. Then we'd have to have articles as stated above about Russians learning v and w, Japanese learning Xhosa clicks, etc. It's endless and seems outside the scope of Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 183.77.65.228 (talk) 13:26, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * You can nominate it for deletion if you'd like. — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 14:46, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * It just isn't the case that Japanese only has one /r/ sound. Using traditional lexical minimal pairs, a contrast between the /r/ and a palatalized /r/ can be demonstrated. Moreover, there is plenty of articulatory variation across both sounds. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.241.54.76 (talk) 00:52, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * That may be less helpful in learning an /l/-/r/ contrast than you might think. English, for example, has both a long and short /i/ sound, but we don't have a /y/ sound. We therefore have some trouble learning the long and short /y/ sounds of, German or Swedish. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 02:43, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

title
I think the page name should be move into "Japanese speakers learning r and l in English".luuva (talk) 17:56, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh gosh, what a long title. Can't we think of something shorter than we have, rather than longer? — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  19:28, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it has to be changed too drastically, but I think perhaps changing it to "Japanese speakers" instead of "the Japanese" might make this title sound a little less 1950s.

Chinese and Korean
Should there be articles on the K and Ch problems with the same phonemes? If so, should they be noted in "See also"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kdammers (talk • contribs) 05:06, 29 April 2012‎ (UTC
 * I think there could be a section in this article about similar issues in other east-Asian languages, and separate articles could be created for Korean and Chinese if the sources exist for it. The links to these hypothetical articles should be in this article, yes. If there was a section about other languages, they could just be linked in the text there. If not, then putting them in the "see also" section sounds like a good idea. Best —  Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 05:13, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Chinese has a rhotic phoneme though, which is very similar to the one in English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.166.150.53 (talk) 13:14, 8 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, Chinese has a rhotic phoneme and as far as I can tell, by experience or reading about it, Chinese speakers do not seem to have the difficulty with these English phonemes that Japanese speakers do. But very many people in the US and in China believe that Chinese speakers do have the same difficulty as Japanese.  I came here looking for facts on that.  So I would like to see someone clear that up one way or the other. Colin McLarty (talk) 04:14, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

General suggestions
Although the information in the lead is crucial, I feel a few more sentences are needed in the lead to make it more explicit why this topic is important; the implications of these production and perception difficulties for second-language acquisition, cross-linguistic speech perception, language transfer, and/or cultural perceptions of Japanese speakers could be mentioned and then later explored in the article. Some of the information assumes reader familiarity with the topic. Technical information in the phonetics section could be explained via diagrams (e.g. cross-sections of the vocal tract to show place of articulation) and technical terms (e.g. “the F3 component,” “phoneme”) should be defined. The content is well-sourced but the references do not follow a consistent format. The current sections are important and informative, but seem a bit disjointed and incomplete. I suggest expanding the training section to include subsections (e.g. an overview of the goals of training, methods of training, and then the effects of training), making the existing “examples” section a subsection under methods of training, and adding a sentence to explain what these examples illustrate. --Bibliophileb (talk) 04:00, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

This article is well-written and is somewhat informative to most readers with backgrounds in linguistics. However, I think the author should go into detail as to why there is such confusion for Japanese people to distinguish between the R and the L sound. The "Production" page of the article can be expanded to explain more in detail as to why this distinction is so hard to make for them to make. Perhaps comparing with other materials to show the development of language of Japanese to those languages with R and L consonants to illustrate the difference will help reader understand how this development occur. In short, this is still a very much work in progress as more references and materials should be added to this article to upgrade this to a higher rank. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zengc (talk • contribs) 03:22, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

The lead section of this article uses abrupt, unexplained statements that refer subtly to the main focus of the article, to the effect of inducing confusion over the article’s main focus. The title, “Perception of /r/ and /l/ by the Japanese,” suggests a generalized (stereotyped) observation of the nationality, rather than a neutral Linguistic occurrence. The structure of the article is fairly clear, moving from one topic to another in a fashion where the proceeding subsection moves on from the one preceding it; however, expansion is needed to flesh out the supportive arguments and academic findings mentioned in each subsection. Furthermore, this article mainly seems to focus on reported Japanese perception of English words and sounds, but does not go into general perception or other secondary language perceptions. Most confusingly, there appears to be some discrepancy over which IPA character is used for ‘r,’ often switching between /r/ and /ɹ/. Some suggestions that I have for this article would be to include information on the two different ‘l’s in the English language (both word-initial and the velarized word-final one); include the IPA transcriptions of the minimal pairs used in the example(s); touch on the perception/production of ‘r’ and ‘l’ in languages/dialects other than the American dialect of English (of which there is a large content bias within the article generalizing this one dialect as “the English Language”). Also, while this article has many sources from varying academic journals, using both Japanese and non-Japanese authors, and spanning a course of time from 1968-2004, a good chunk of these cited articles come from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, likely lending to the dependency bias mentioned above. Thus, I would like to see a more globally-considered (both language-wise and Academia-wise) revision to this article. --Tsadler00 (talk) 00:29, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Article unnecessary for an already solved problem?
This WP article says:

> "Miyawaki et al (1975) found that Japanese speakers could distinguish /r/ and /l/ just as well as native English speakers if the sounds were acoustically manipulated in a way that made them sound less like speech by removal of all acoustic information except the F3 component" <

What's the problem? Everybody (especially in 4G mobile Japan) has a smartphone nowadays, with 2/4 core 1+GHz CPU and 1+GB RAM onboard. Just write a software for Android that makes the phone detect the speech and does the Fast-Fourier Transformation or other math magic necessary. Speech gets transmitted unchanged to both ear via headphone, but when R or L sounds sound, the electronics strips all noise from, say the right ear, except F3, in real-time. This way the japanese listener of english speech would be able to get all info, including the correct R/L differentation.

This could really propel school teaching of english in Japan, because kids listening to the teacher via their smartphones would be spared the embarrassment of misunderstanding words with L/R content. (In asian cultures embarrassment leads to humiliation, which is probably a big demotivator.)

If the above approach works, the algorithm could move onto custom circuits, which fit in-ear hearing aids. Nowadays we have such digital in-ear tech, worn by american soldiers, that detects gunshots in any environment and amplifies them into warnings real-time, while cancelling all noise background. (Thus warriors cannot be ambushed undetected.) These micro-mini chips do 5k FFT / microsecond on a button cell of power per week, yet work reliable enough to trust one's life on it on the battlefield. The same hardware could probably be reprogrammed easily for L/R differentiating F3 filtering, for the japanese users?

Best Regards: Tamas Feher from Budapest, Hungary. 79.120.172.180 (talk) 23:12, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
 * It seems like you're saying that, because there is a technological solution for a language learning issue, that we shouldn't have this article. That would be a misunderstanding of the purpose of encyclopedia articles. We don't delete the article on alcohol prohibition because it's been repealed or phrenology because it's an outdated area of study. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 22:56, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


 * What forking good is it to make speech sound less like speech. Besides the above-cited research is typical garabage that assumes (begs the question) that English l-r is a simple two-phoneme contrast. It arguably IS NOT. One reason why it is hard to acquire might be the amount of articulatory variation across English l and English r sounds. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.241.54.76 (talk) 00:55, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean by "make speech sound less like speech" but you should probably check out the sources before you assume that they do not consider articulatory variation. According to what is in this article already, Lively et al. (1994), take into account allophonic variation in their study. Studies have also incorporated the perception and production of /w/. — Æµ§œš¹  [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]  02:39, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

mess
dude wtf even is this article. Currently begins: "Japanese has one liquid phoneme /r/, realized usually as an apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant [l]. English has two: rhotic /r/ and lateral /l/, with varying phonetic realizations centered on the postalveolar approximant [ɹ̠] and on the alveolar lateral approximant [l], respectively." does anyone believe a basic reader is going to find this information insightful in the first 2 seconds of arriving at this article or even understand what the article is about? Let's start by addressing what the article is about, ideally by incorporating the title, or at the very least, e.g.. "Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing the /r/ and /l/ of English accurately." then we can elaborate on the liquid pheramones and and tapioca-avocado cups if anyone is still reading. 98.177.32.133 (talk) 17:11, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

About the recent edits
There's no contradiction between the info I translated from jawiki and Kikuo Maekawa' paper. Maekawa claimed that it cannot be a prototypical postalveolar (i.e. palato-alveolar) sound in Japanese sense, nor as back as a prototypical retroflex in Japanese sense (i.e. subapical). Of course both r are more front than alveolopalatal sy (as being a tap it's harder to be palatalized) and may further varies according to vowels. Yet the important thing is that r is more back than alveolar d and that ry is more tap/plosive than alveolopalatal dy>dzy, and the central position suiting that is somewhere between alveolar and retroflex, that is, apical postalveolar. I think it's important to consider what Japanese themselves think what r sounds like. The Japanese Wikipedia uses the terms "postalveolar" and "retroflex" in their most narrow definition, yet still include "そり舌側面接近音 []" a major possible realization of r and both "歯茎硬口蓋はじき音 []" (the description claimed alveolopalatal ɾ̻̠ʲ) and "硬口蓋はじき音 []" two major possible realizations of ry. Maekawa's article actually confirmed the info I translated from jawiki. Even if you don't agree with anything above, the original claim "most often realized as an alveolar tap [ɾ]" is apparently inaccurate, as tap only frequently occurs in intervowel position while lateral tap commonly occurs in both initial and intervowel positions, so "most often realized as an alveolar lateral tap" is more accurate. --173.68.165.114 (talk) 06:00, 1 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm at a complete loss as to how one can consider these statements to be compatible with each other:
 * The Japanese liquid has an postalveolar tap as its primary allophone between two a (your addition)
 * it is clearly mistaken to regard the Japanese /r/ as a post-alveolar sound. ... This is contradictory to the description of [Okada 1999] that regards the Japanese /r/ as a post-alveolar consonant. It is rather an alveolar sound to the exclusion of the post-alveolar articulation. (Maekawa 2023)
 * Postalveolar means postalveolar. There are no narrower or broader definitions. It doesn't mean "more back than an alveolar sound in the same language". The difference between the places of /t, d/ and /r/ in Japanese is described as a difference in the active place, namely laminal and apical.
 * We're constrained by neither what Japanese speakers think nor what Japanese Wikipedia says. We're constrained by what reliable sources say.
 * "most often realized as an alveolar lateral tap" is more accurate Source? Nardog (talk) 07:19, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Only the English consonants?
Have they not the same problems with any foreign language distinguishing between "r" and "l"? Or is that just a wrong stereotype about Asians? Are the English sounds special in comparison to other (Germanic?) languages? Or to other European languages? 2A0A:A541:F414:0:B5B8:65ED:4DEB:DE06 (talk) 21:43, 6 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Quite right, the problem applies not just to English but to any language that contrasts /r/ and /l/, and affects speakers of not just Japanese but any language that doesn't. Nardog (talk) 01:24, 14 December 2023 (UTC)